The Observations of Henry

“Well, I met him; and he told me. It was the old story: a gal was at the bottom of it. He had broken into a small house at Hampstead. He was on the floor, packing up the silver, when the door opens, and he sees a gal standing there. She held a candle in one hand and a revolver in the other.

“‘Put your hands up above your head,’ says she.

“‘I looked at the revolver,’ said Joe, telling me; ‘it was about eighteen inches off my nose; and then I looked at the gal. There’s lots of ‘em will threaten to blow your brains out for you, but you’ve only got to look at ‘em to know they won’t.

“‘They are thinking of the coroner’s inquest, and wondering how the judge will sum up. She met my eyes, and I held up my hands. If I hadn’t I wouldn’t have been here.

“‘Now you go in front,’ says she to Joe, and he went. She laid her candle down in the hall and unbolted the front door.

“‘What are you going to do?’ says Joe, ‘call the police? Because if so, my dear, I’ll take my chance of that revolver being loaded and of your pulling the trigger in time. It will be a more dignified ending.’

“‘No,’ says she, ‘I had a brother that got seven years for forgery. I don’t want to think of another face like his when he came out. I’m going to see you outside my master’s house, and that’s all I care about.’

“She went down the garden-path with him, and opened the gate.

“‘You turn round,’ says she, ‘before you reach the bottom of the lane and I give the alarm.’ And Joe went straight, and didn’t look behind him.

“Well, it was a rum beginning to a courtship, but the end was rummer. The girl was willing to marry him if he would turn honest. Joe wanted to turn honest, but didn’t know how.

“‘It’s no use fixing me down, my dear, to any quiet, respectable calling,’ says Joe to the gal, ‘because, even if the police would let me alone, I wouldn’t be able to stop there. I’d break out, sooner or later, try as I might.’

“The girl went to her master, who seems to have been an odd sort of a cove, and told him the whole story. The old gent said he’d see Joe, and Joe called on him.

“‘What’s your religion?’ says the old gent to Joe.

“‘I’m not particular, sir; I’ll leave it to you,’ says Joe.

“‘Good!’ says the old gent. ‘You’re no fanatic. What are your principles?’

“At first Joe didn’t think he’d got any, but, the old gent leading, he found to his surprise as he had.

“‘I believe,’ says Joe, ‘in doing a job thoroughly.’

“‘What your hand finds to do, you believe in doing with all your might, eh?’ says the old gent.

“‘That’s it, sir,’ says Joe. ‘That’s what I’ve always tried to do.’

“‘Anything else?’ asks the old gent.

“‘Yes; stick to your pals,’ said Joe.

“‘Through thick and thin,’ suggests the old gent.

“‘To the blooming end,’ agrees Joe.

“‘That’s right,’ says the old gent. ‘Faithful unto death. And you really want to turn over a new leaf – to put your wits and your energy and your courage to good use instead of bad?’

“‘That’s the idea,’ says Joe.

“The old gent murmurs something to himself about a stone which the builders wouldn’t have at any price; and then he turns and puts it straight:

“‘If you undertake the work,’ says he, ‘you’ll go through with it without faltering – you’ll devote your life to it?’

“‘If I undertake the job, I’ll do that,’ says Joe. ‘What may it be?’

“‘To go to Africa,’ says the old gent, ‘as a missionary.’

“Joe sits down and stares at the old gent, and the old gent looks him back.

“‘It’s a dangerous station,’ says the old gent. ‘Two of our people have lost their lives there. It wants a man there – a man who will do something besides preach, who will save these poor people we have gathered together there from being scattered and lost, who will be their champion, their protector, their friend.’

“In the end, Joe took on the job, and went out with his wife. A better missionary that Society never had and never wanted. I read one of his early reports home; and if the others were anything like it his life must have been exciting enough, even for him. His station was a small island of civilisation, as one may say, in the middle of a sea of savages. Before he had been there a month the place had been attacked twice. On the first occasion Joe’s ‘flock’ had crowded into the Mission House, and commenced to pray, that having been the plan of defence adopted by his predecessor. Joe cut the prayer short, and preached to them from the text, ‘Heaven helps them as helps themselves’; after which he proceeded to deal out axes and old rifles. In his report he mentioned that he had taken a hand himself, merely as an example to the flock; I bet he had never enjoyed an evening more in all his life. The second fight began, as usual, round the Mission, but seems to have ended two miles off. In less than six months he had rebuilt the school-house, organised a police force, converted all that was left of one tribe, and started a tin church. He added (but I don’t think they read that part of his report aloud) that law and order was going to be respected, and life and property secure in his district so long as he had a bullet left.

“Later on the Society sent him still further inland, to open up a fresh station; and there it was that, according to the newspapers, the cannibals got hold of him and ate him. As I said, personally I don’t believe it. One of these days he’ll turn up, sound and whole; he is that sort.”

THE SURPRISE OF MR. MILBERRY

It’s not the sort of thing to tell ‘em,” remarked Henry, as, with his napkin over his arm, he leant against one of the pillars of the verandah, and sipped the glass of Burgundy I had poured out for him; “and they wouldn’t believe it if you did tell ‘em, not one of ‘em. But it’s the truth, for all that. Without the clothes they couldn’t do it.”

“Who wouldn’t believe what?” I asked. He had a curious habit, had Henry, of commenting aloud upon his own unspoken thoughts, thereby bestowing upon his conversation much of the quality of the double acrostic. We had been discussing the question whether sardines served their purpose better as a hors d’oeuvre or as a savoury; and I found myself wondering for the moment why sardines, above all other fish, should be of an unbelieving nature; while endeavouring to picture to myself the costume best adapted to display the somewhat difficult figure of a sardine. Henry put down his glass, and came to my rescue with the necessary explanation.

“Why, women – that they can tell one baby from another, without its clothes. I’ve got a sister, a monthly nurse, and she will tell you for a fact, if you care to ask her, that up to three months of age there isn’t really any difference between ‘em. You can tell a girl from a boy and a Christian child from a black heathen, perhaps; but to fancy you can put your finger on an unclothed infant and say: ‘That’s a Smith, or that’s a Jones,’ as the case may be – why, it’s sheer nonsense. Take the things off ‘em, and shake them up in a blanket, and I’ll bet you what you like that which is which you’d never be able to tell again so long as you lived.”

I agreed with Henry, so far as my own personal powers of discrimination might be concerned, but I suggested that to Mrs. Jones or Mrs. Smith there would surely occur some means of identification.

“So they’d tell you themselves, no doubt,” replied Henry; “and of course, I am not thinking of cases where the child might have a mole or a squint, as might come in useful. But take ‘em in general, kids are as much alike as sardines of the same age would be. Anyhow, I knew a case where a fool of a young nurse mixed up two children at an hotel, and to this day neither of those women is sure that she’s got her own.”

“Do you mean,” I said, “there was no possible means of distinguishing?”

“There wasn’t a flea-bite to go by,” answered Henry. “They had the same bumps, the same pimples, the same scratches; they were the same age to within three days; they weighed the same to an ounce; and they measured the same to an inch. One father was tall and fair, and the other was short and dark. The tall, fair man had a dark, short wife; and the short, dark man had married a tall, fair woman. For a week they changed those kids to and fro a dozen times a day, and cried and quarrelled over them. Each woman felt sure she was the mother of the one that was crowing at the moment, and when it yelled she was positive it was no child of hers. They thought they would trust to the instinct of the children. Neither child, so long as it wasn’t hungry, appeared to care a curse for anybody; and when it was hungry it always wanted the mother that the other kid had got. They decided, in the end, to leave it to time. It’s three years ago now, and possibly enough some likeness to the parents will develop that will settle the question. All I say is, up to three months old you can’t tell ‘em, I don’t care who says you can.”

He paused, and appeared to be absorbed in contemplation of the distant Matterhorn, then clad in its rosy robe of evening. There was a vein of poetry in Henry, not uncommon among cooks and waiters. The perpetual atmosphere of hot food I am inclined to think favourable to the growth of the softer emotions. One of the most sentimental men I ever knew kept a ham-and-beef shop just off the Farringdon Road. In the early morning he could be shrewd and business-like, but when hovering with a knife and fork above the mingled steam of bubbling sausages and hissing peas-pudding, any whimpering tramp with any impossible tale of woe could impose upon him easily.

“But the rummiest go I ever recollect in connection with a baby,” continued Henry after a while, his gaze still fixed upon the distant snow-crowned peaks, “happened to me at Warwick in the Jubilee year. I’ll never forget that.”

“Is it a proper story,” I asked, “a story fit for me to hear?”

On consideration, Henry saw no harm in it, and told it to me accordingly.

He came by the ‘bus that meets the 4.52. He’d a handbag and a sort of hamper: it looked to me like a linen-basket. He wouldn’t let the Boots touch the hamper, but carried it up into his bedroom himself. He carried it in front of him by the handles, and grazed his knuckles at every second step. He slipped going round the bend of the stairs, and knocked his head a rattling good thump against the balustrade; but he never let go that hamper – only swore and plunged on. I could see he was nervous and excited, but one gets used to nervous and excited people in hotels. Whether a man’s running away from a thing, or running after a thing, he stops at a hotel on his way; and so long as he looks as if he could pay his bill one doesn’t trouble much about him. But this man interested me: he was so uncommonly young and innocent-looking. Besides, it was a dull hole of a place after the sort of jobs I’d been used to; and when you’ve been doing nothing for three months but waiting on commercial gents as are having an exceptionally bad season, and spoony couples with guide-books, you get a bit depressed, and welcome any incident, however slight, that promises to be out of the common.

I followed him up into his room, and asked him if I could do anything for him. He flopped the hamper on the bed with a sigh of relief, took off his hat, wiped his head with his handkerchief, and then turned to answer me.

“Are you a married man?” says he.

It was an odd question to put to a waiter, but coming from a gent there was nothing to be alarmed about.

“Well, not exactly,” I says – I was only engaged at that time, and that not to my wife, if you understand what I mean – “but I know a good deal about it,” I says, “and if it’s a matter of advice – ”